Michael Gabriel Hernandez
04 October 2025•Update: 04 October 2025
WASHINGTON
US President Donald Trump has ordered a review of federal funding to Portland, Oregon, that can be cut, the White House said Friday, as city and state leaders continue to push back on his attempts to send military forces to the city.
"He has directed his team here at the White House to begin reviewing aid that can potentially be cut in Portland. We will not fund states that allow anarchy," White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters, referring to the president.
"There will also be an additional surge of federal resources to Portland immediately, including enhanced CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) resources," she added.
Trump said Tuesday that he instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use American metropolises as "training grounds" for the military as he continues to send troops into more cities.
"I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military," Trump told top military brass at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, describing the deployments as part of a "war from within" on crime and immigration.
"Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. But there are many cities in great shape too, by the way, but it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles -- they're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten that one by one, and this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room.
"That's a war, too. It's a war from within," he said.
Trump previously deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and is in the works to do so in Memphis, Tennessee. He also deployed the Marines to Los Angeles to quell unrest because of his immigration crackdown.
Last Saturday, the president said he was ordering the deployment of the "military" to Portland, which he maintained Tuesday is "a war zone."
Portland and state officials sued the Trump administration to halt the military deployment and a hearing on a temporary restraining order is scheduled to take place later Friday.
The Oregon Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to temporarily block Trump from federalizing and deploying Oregon National Guard troops to protect federal buildings in Portland.
Senior Assistant Attorney General Scott Kennedy wrote in a court filing that crime is sharply down in Portland, which he said "is not under siege, war-ravaged, or otherwise a particularly violent or unruly major city."
"There is no law-enforcement or public-order need for a federal deployment to Portland," he wrote. "Rather than improve public safety at the ICE-Facility protests, or in Portland more generally, the deployment is likely to provoke a larger protest."
